Evolthon

Evolthon is a first of a kind initiative engaging the evolution community in search for innovative ways to evolve microorganisms to new environments. Evolthon Challenge was a community effort, thus ~30 participants from around the world participated in the challenge (see Participants section for details). Each participate could choose between E. coli or S. cerevisiae. Participants had to come up with what they believed was the best way to evolve their organism of choice to cold temperature (15c/20c for E. coli/S. cerevisiae) (see Strategies section for short description of the various strategies used in the challenge). 

At the end of the evolution part that was done in the various labs, each participant sent his evolved strain back to us so we could evaluate the fitness of the strains and compare their performance under various conditions using pooled competition assay. 

In this site, you can find the list of participants and strategies, a description of the various assays to evaluate fitness, raw data, some of the results and contact information. We encourage participants to further analyze the data.